As... I Walked ,Down New Grub Street , ; ; -i

Memories of a Writing Life

WALTER ALLEN

The University of Chicago Press ;:::1

The University of~hicago Press to'Peggy Chicago, 60637

William Heinemann Ltd, London W1X 9P A

© 1981 by Walter Allen All rights reserved Published 1981

Published with financial assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain

ISBN 0--226-01433--9

Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 81--69852 PR ('.POO I

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Printed in Great Britain the scholarship, rhymed roughly with 'bally fool'. In those days, there 'Sir', which I feared was sardonic. I felt he had sized me up. I was was only one scholarship in English at Oxford. The set books were six getting hungry again but I was too shy or gauche to ask him when Shakespeare plays, Milton's English poetry, six of johnson's Lives and dinner was served or where. Culture and Anar~hy. The plays and the Lives were not entirely new to The evening d'ragged on, the room never became warm, the me, but most of the Milton was. Since no one from the staff could be grarriophones mocked. I was very hungry but dared not go to a spared from his other teaching to coach me, I had to master them restaurant again, for my tea had proved more expensive than I'd myself as best I could. I could only have been miserably unprepared, 'expected. I wrote two falsely cheerfnlletters: I felt as a child must feel though I was confident as I have never been since. on its first night in hospital among the dazzling, sterilised whiteness On a cold, raw, early December day I made the journey to Oxford. ,and the bright impersonal nurses. It was the early days of vacation and there were still some undergradu­ I must have found Hall in time for breakfast next morning, for I ates up; I have the impression now of tall, self-possessed young men, remember no more problems about meals. But the isolation, or the most of them blond with college scarves round their necks and of sense of it, persisted. It was a lack of grace in me, but it was gramophones with horns playing in college windows. I was put in inescapable. As I recall, there were over a hundred ~andidates in for rooms occupied in term by a man I knew was the son of a former Lord the examination and, as I eyed them, they seemed to know one Mayor of Birmingham. In his autobiography Pack My Bag, Henry another intimately and half Balliol besides. In the five or six meals I Green comments on the lack of comfort at Oxford after Eton: I was ate in Hall I think I spoke to only one boy and then because he spoke amazed that one person could possess two such rooms for his sole use. I to me first. He was a tall, handsome youth with a scar down his left felt awkward and embarrassed, very much an intruder. I examined the cheek. He wore a grey flannel suit and was at Shrewsbury, which was books on the shelves. They told me nothing: brown limp volumes of the name of the house I'd been in at my elementary school. I liked him Plato and the Greek tragic poets in Greek,-which I didn't understand, enormously but I was tongue-tied and could say nothing more than some Jane Austen and Kipling, representative works of E. V. Knox yes and no. I must have seemed insufferably churlish. and A. P. Herbert. I was miserably conscious and bitterly ashamed of the envy and My self-confidence was shrinking. I didn't know what to do; for rancour I felt. I had not known I possessed them. And I was intimi­ some reason, I expected someone to come and look for me, someone I dated by my surroundings, by the hall with its enormous open fires, would be accountable to. I was unused to freedom. I was hungry; it the like of which I had not seen before, by the portraits of the College was drizzling outside, and I was cold, and though the fire was laid I worthies that look down from the walls, Matthew Arnold with his did not light it for fear of offending. I roamed Balliol in vain, and for prim and supercilious air among them, by the bright young dons who my three days' sojourn Balliol remained a college without water- supervised the examination, some of whom seemed scarcely older , closets. Percipiently, the City of Oxford had placed public lavatories than the examinees. As for the examination papers, they terrified me. in the Broad just by the college ,gates, and to these I repaired when it I could see they were much more intelligent than any I had met before was necessary. and demanded a wider and more accurate knowledge than I ppssessed. I went to the Cadena for tea and probably had herring roes on toast, The ordeal ended, I left Oxford on the first possible train. Next for that was my current notion of high living. I bought a packet of morning, Joe eagerly studied the papers and approved my choice of Players' cigarettes, and my self-esteem rose when a charming young questions. I did not tell anyone how wretched I had been. Weeks man came over from a nearby table and asked me for a light. By the later, Joe showed me a copy of the Manchester Guardian containing the time I returned to Balliol, my self-esteem had guttered. It was dark results: the scholarship had been won by a man already at Balliol. Joe now, and the gramophones were louder. Forlorn and cold, in despera­ said he would write and find out my marks. Ifhe did, he had pity on tion I lit the fire and crouched over the unimpressive flames, reading me, for he never told me. Knox and Herbert, neither of whom I found remarkably funny. The For years, I could not remember that episode in my life without scout arrived, and I felt I had done wrong in lighting the fire. He was squirming. No doubt it was a salutary experience, for it compelled 'a a brusq ue, bustling man, very neat in an Army way, and he called me truer estimate of myself. All the same, I wish it had been less painful 26 27 or I had been more prepared for it. As it was, it exacerbated a sense of Oxford and Cambridge are free. class and class-privilege that I have never wholly freed myself of. For Of the two, I have always felt closer to Oxford, as the more me, men on strike always have justice on their side. sympathetic, possibly because it was the choice of my childish parti­ It also conditioned for good my responses to Oxford, which have sanship on Boat'Race Day. Towards Cambridge I can be cool as remained ambivalent. When I went to live as a writer in London in , towards a market town deep in the Fens and even find it a trifle the Thirties, I was struck by the way it was assumed that I was a , provincial and priggish. I have been much more frequently to Oxford university man, meaning by that of either Oxford or Cambridge and, , and have always had more and closer friends' there. My attitude to it of in my case it seemed, Oxford rather than not. It became a point of love-and-hate seems enshrined now in a visit I made in the summer of honour to assert that I was a graduate of Birmingham, thank you, for 1955 to Christ Church, as the guest of the young Norman St John­ the assumption that I must be of Oxford seemed to me only another Stevas, whom I had met at about this time on the Society of Authors' example, conscious or not, of the snobbery of the English. This, I see committee under Sir Alan Herbert that was looking into the law now, was absurd. Even I, who had a vested interest in such matters, relating to obscenity. St John-Stevas was then a law student at Christ knew of only one other writer among my immediate contemporaries Church. My visit proved a mixed delight. Dinner was enjoyable; I'sat who was a product of a provincial university. That was Rayner next to J. I. M. Stewart, who was the English don in the college and Heppenstall from Leeds. My friend Henry Reed was still unpublished had come in to dine that evening in order to meet me. That was and unknown. And before us? Gissing, Lawrence, Brett Young, gratifying. After dinner, we adjourned to the Senior Common Room, Herbert Read cannot exhaust the list, but the names of the others do if that is its proper name, for the ritual drinking of port. St John­ not come precisely trippingly to the tongue. Even in the Thirties, if a Stevas suggested that we should ignore the port and continue drink­ young English writer had a university education, you more or less had ing claret, which we did. When we had finished the bottle my to assume that the university was either Oxford or Cambridge. neighbour, who was Roy Harrod, urged me to have some port. It was, Nowadays, the assumption is much less safe and is made much less he said, very good. But the port had been three times round the table, automatically. All the same, though it will not speedily be shaken, and - presumably because rirual demanded it - I found three glasses one may still regret the Oxford and Cambridge domination of the in front of me. English educational system. In a very real sense, the other English I was chivvied by an absurd old man who was a superannuated universities will always be second-best, even though no Oxford man, Fellow. He was, I learned, a great Oxford character, the equivalent, in not even the youngest, smuggest and most stupid, can touch a other words, ofa licensed buffoon. His one excuse was his age. He was Harvard graduate in his built-in belief that his college is the finest, absurdly solicitous on my behalf; insultingly so, for I could see that I the noblest, the greatest in North America and that to have been had become his butt. Had I, he asked me, ever kn9wn anyone who elsewhere is necessarily to have failed to know the best. Staggering as had been at the House? I said I knew a novelist named Green who I the arrogance of Harvard men can be, it is still relatively harmless, believed had been at the House. He doubted whether this was since the United States is a vast country in which Harvard, for all its possible; he could not think of any novelist named Green who had being a place of enormous distinction, is merely one among other been at the House; though, come to think of it, there was a young institutions of comparable distinction, the University of Chicago, man named Greene with a final -e at the House at the present time Johns Hopkins, Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, the reading, if he remembered aright, physics, and his father, he University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel believed, was a novelist called, he believed, Graham Greene. This _ Hill, to pick out names almost at random. But England is a tiny triumphantly - was doubtless the man I had been thinking of! No, I country, and Oxford and Cambridge were its only universities for replied, Graham was a Balliol man; I was thinking of a man named seven hundred years. The ambience is one that the sensitive and Henry Green; and then I had laboriously to explain that Green was imaginative will always seek out, and this apart, they are still pre­ n~t his real name but a pseudonym; his real name was Yorke, Henry eminent as centres of teaching and learning. Others - Manchester, Vmcent Yorke. I further explained that Henry Yorke had gone down Sussex, the rest - abide our 'question. Like Arnold's Shakespeare, from Oxford without a degree. This demanded a searching of the 28 29 college records. Cursing myself for having been so stupid as to get myself involved in this discussion, I awaited the old man's return. He was more triumphant than ever. No such name was on the college books. My mistake, I began to be aware, was nothing short of fraudulent. III I have since discovered, from Anthony Powell's memoirs, that Henry Green was indeed not at the House. Later in the evening, Lord Cherwell, Churchill's scientific adviser, Professor Lindemann, came in. He was always called Prof. He was a Student - that is to say a Fellow - of Christ Church and lived there, though, because he was a vegetarian, he rarely dined in Hall. But he made a point of visiting his carousing colleagues nightly. A very tall, severe-looking man with a domed bald head. My aged and unwel­ In the Michaelmas term in 1929 I entered Birmingham University, as come mentor beckoned to him. 'Prof. , I want you to meet our guest an undergraduate in the Honour School of English. It was a split Mr Allen. Mr Allen writes for the New Statesman.' 'A paper I do not university, literally. The campus, at that date a daring Americanism I read,' said Cherwell and turned away. Never was I so magnificently first encountered on the lips of the Vice-Chancellor, a man my Uncle snubbed, and the old man watched with glee. Ted assured me was a 'bloody old woman - he talks too much' , was at Next day I ran into E. R. Dodds in Cornmarket. 'What are you Edgbaston and housed only scientiSts and commerce students. I was doing in Oxford?' he wanted to know. I told him I had been staying at at Mason College, a sham-Gothic building in the middle of the city, Christ Church; I had forgotten his Chair was established there. 'Why which, in my memory, stinks permanently of gas. Mason - Sir Josiah didn't you let me know?' he said. 'I'd have come into dinner. I dine Mason - was a nineteenth-century industrialist and philanthropist. there very infrequently.' I could see why. There was a statue of him in Chamberlain Square - 'Squirt Square' to Against this, and in fairness, I have to remember the pleasant times us, because of the fountain - opposite the College. He is represented I have had in Oxford and the friends I have there. And I recall that the in Victorian dress sitting in a chair under which are rolls of what day after that dinner at the House I met Asa Briggs at" Worcester looks uncommonly like wallpaper but are, I assume, the deeds of the College for the first time. " University. But I am anticipating. My last months at school, after my Balliol Mason College was the seat of the Faculties of Medicine Law and trip, were unstrenuous and unremarkable. On the result of the "Arts and the Department of Education , and, like the Unive~sity, was Higher Certificate examination I gained an entrance scholarship to itself split, for the rear half of the building was sacrosanct to medicos Birmingham University. That really settled my immediate future. and dentists, a race apart. There was a medical school in Birmingham for the best part of a hundred years before the University, and medical students tended to behave as though the University did not exist. In any case, their first loyalty went inevitably to the hospitals where they were taught. They were, I think, physically different from us in the Arts faculty, bigger, burlier, and they spoke with a markedly differ­ ent accent. They were public school almost to a man, and the difference in size and physique was a class difference. The law students were similarly public school and middle-class. If! knew rather more of them than I did medical students, who greatly outnumbered them, it was because they made a practice of debating, and I too for a time patronised debating. Men from public schools 30 31 rose and went into the billiard room. There was a coffin on the billiard man to be in some sense modelled on the author. The background, table. An occasion when Wystan was not allowed to play Hymns beyond Derbyshire, was Birmingham. At first sight, 0 Providence was Ancient and Modern. disconcertingly different. It was an autobiographical novel of the Back in the lounge, he ordered another round of double brandies. It youngest child ora wealthy Midland family that loses its money and was as though all the money in the world was his. Under his eagle eye slides disastrously down the social scale. we drank them down. 'We must go,' he commanded; 'we must catch Some days later Ihad found an answer to my letter on writing paper the train.' He led us out of the pub into the street, striding ahead of us that bore· the legend Four Ashes, Dorridge, Warwickshire. John like intrepid Stanley in darkest Africa. Arm-in-arm, clutching their sugges·ted I should come over one evening to dinner, proposed a date enormous bouquets, John and Therese followed. Louis, Reggie and and a train from Snow Hill and said he would be on the platform at myself brought up the rear . We were conscious that things like this Knowle Station to meet me. When I descended from the train there did not take place in Soli hull every day. were two people on the platform, a man who seemed very tiny and was At the station, Wystan produced another five-pound note and walking up and down and, sitting on a bench, the ruins of a beautiful bought first-class tickets. At Snow Hill we took a taxi to the Burling­ boy, a mongol rapidly running to fat. I was one of two dozen people ton Restaurant, where a table was waiting for us. Wystan was fairly who got out of the train, and the tiny man, who seemed tiny because dripping with money, and in a most lordly way, to my surprise, for he he was an inch or so shorter than myself, made unerringly for me. His was reputed to be rather mean where money was concerned. But today appearance was striking: he was plainly an unusual man. He had a it was plain that expense was no object, and under his encouragement large undershot jaw, deep lustrous brown eyes and brown hair that we ate and drank lavishly. At two-thirty he got up and said: 'I must came down over his right temple like a lick of paint. We identified get back to work', and summoned the waiter. He took a wad of notes ourselves and he introduced me to the ruined boy on the bench. 'This from his pocket. When he had paid the waiter he said philosophically: is Ronald', he said, and Ronald made an uncouth noise and let me 'It's all on Thomas Mann.' shake a limp hand. He was an imbecile; his beauty was larded in fat; We went our different ways, Auden I assume to his curtained, his age I could not guess. Later, I learned he was slightly older than artificially-lighted room in his parents' house in the Lordswood Road, John, who was ten years older than I. John was his nurse, though he Harbourne, Reggie to the University and I to my office. Louis took was called turor. . John and Therese to the Futurist Cinema in John Bright Street for We walked the mile or so to Four Ashes. Ronald shambling ahead, their honeymoon. When the show was over, bride and groom walked grunting from time to time. He could not speak, though he could back to Snow Hill, for John had to catch the 6.30 train. Just before it imitate a cockerel, a cow and a dog and say 'bikyckle', accomplish­ departed, Therese slipped away, to return as the train was beginning ments he was proud of and gave vent to on making new acquain­ to pull out, with a bottle of Scotch, which she pushed into John's tances. His mental age, I suppose, was that of a child before he can hands. talk. A winding drive half a mile long brought us to Four Ashes. The It proved to be a very happy marriage. Husband and wife saw each fa<;ade was that of an Elizabethan cottage, which had been added to other onl y rarely and during the war years not at all, for Therese was in and enlarged. In front of it was a very small pond on which moorhens Switzerland. John was always very proud of her, and I think there w~s were nesting, and it was surrounded by a garden of several acres, with genuine communion between them. orchard and paddock. I met Hampson the week after I met Auden. I had written to him I was presented to John's employers, the Wilsons, who were care of the Hogarth Press asking if! could meet him and enclosing a unaffected and charming roo. They gave me sherry and discreetly copy of my radio script. I had read and greatly liked his two novels withdrew; every so often Mr Wilson would pass the window trundl­ Saturday Night at the Greyhound and 0 Providence and my notions of him ing a wheelbarrow. Later, I was to learn that Mr Wilson ('Skipper') were derived solely from these novels. The Greyhound of the first was was managing director of a large firm of wholesale grocers. The a pub in a North Derbyshire mining village and the young hero was Wilsons were wealthy Nonconformists, simple people but people of the barman, who was the landlord's brother-in-law. I took the bar- talent. One of 'Skipper's' brothers was a painter who taught at the 58 59 , --l Birmingham School of Art; another was F. P. Wilson, the Shakes­ been lessees of the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, for the best part of a pearean scholar and Merton Professor of English at Oxfurd. When they century and during the period of John's early life had dropped from discovered that Ronald was mentally deficient the Wilsons had middle-class affluence to something close to working-class poverty. retired from Birmingham and bought Four Ashes, in the compara­ Now they were moving up again. John's elder brother Jimmy Simp- tively unspoiled Warwickshire countryside and within easy commut­ . son 'was the famous racing motor-cyclist, a fact that had led to an ing distance of Birmingham. They had enlarged and modernised the .: amusing confusion. Jimmy's fame was featuted in the publisher's cottage and bought more and more of the surrounding land; their publicity· for John, and when Saturday Night was translated into lives revolved round it and Ronald. How they and John had come into French and published in Paris by NRF. John was described in the contact with one another I never knew. When I met him he had been introduction, by the eminent critic Ramon Fernandez, as the illustri­ with them for about ten years and he seemed to me on that early ous rider in the British TT races and therefore a notable example of summer evening in 1933 very much like an eldest son to them. the man of action as novelist: he was compared with T. E. Lawrence. Saturday Night was published in 1931. Until then they had known John had suffered from the decline in the family fortunes. He had nothing of John's writing life and ambitions. And then, as it were had little formal education and, insofar as he was educated, was overnight, they found themselves entertaining men like E. M. Forster entirely self-educated. There were some things he never mastered. and William Plomer at weekends. Spelling was one, and his pronunciations tended towards eccentricity. I do not remember what we had for dinner that evening, though I I remember he prounced 'mature' as though it rhymed with 'nature'; am pretty sure we had asparagus from the garden. I remember the he knew it didn't but preferred it that way. His punctuation was also bowls of sweet peas reflected on the highly polished refectory table eccentric, though in a curious way was right for him. It became an and I remember the horse-brasses on the beams. I don't think I had integral part of his style. Brought up in Leicester during the First ever seen them before except on cart-horses. World War, he had runaway from home at sixteen and worked in Mter dinner, John took me to his room, which was bedroom and hotels first as kitchen boy and later as a waiter. What led him into study combined. It. was in the old part of the house, long and narrow reading I do not know. For a time he made his living as a book thief. with a very low ceiling and leaded windows. It struck me as being He told me the most profitable book to steal was Gray's Anatomy, something of a shrine to himself. It was dominated by two paintings which all medical students had to possess and was expensive. As a of him in which he looked very farouche. Above his bed was a framed book thief, he had served a sentence in Wormwood Scrubs. 1 imagine cartoon from the Daily Mail, whose cartoonist had had a field day at a it was after that that he came to Four Ashes, and its sequestered Heinemann cocktail party. Against a background of glass-juggling siruation was part of i ts attraction for him. He was terribly frightened guests in evening clothes was John in a lounge suit, his face lit up with that his past might be uncovered, and this made him very suspicious gay malice, talking to a lady who towered above him in a tuxedo and of journalists and of publicity. This was one reason, I think, why he with an eyeglass clamped in her eye. This was Una, Lady Troubridge, had suppressed for writing purposes the family surname of Simpson Radclyffe Hall's friend. She had certainly been at the party, John told and adopted his second name of Hampson. me, for he had seen her there, but they had not spoken to each other. I have said that John seemed very much the eldest son to the The chest of drawers was lined with photographs and snapshots of Wilsons. They were grateful to him for what he had done for Ronald, John in a group with Virginia Woolf, with Forster, with members of who, on his worst days, John alone could control. His influence was Bloomsbury. One wall of the room was lined with books: John had everywhere in the house, which was a house full- every room was full the finest collection of twentieth-'century novels I have ever seen. In - of novels. The sixpenny weeklies were everywhere. He had intro­ two or three years' time the aspect of the room as John'S shrine was to duced the Wilsons to wines and food exotic to Birmingham. He had be still further emphasised by the presence, on a low table which taught them, when celebration was called for or in times of undue became the room's focal point, of Gordon Herickx's bust of him. depression, to open a bottle of champagne. And they had responded. I discovered more about John. 0 Providence was autobiographical: I would not have cared myself to spend my life as companion to an the little boy Justin was John. The Hampsons (Simpson in fact) had imbecile but I saw that in some respects John's life at Four Ashes was 60 61 enviable. He lived in civilised comfort there and had distinguished the novel in particular. He was the first novelist I had met and friends in London. Which made me the more surprised when, in the certainly the first man who fell into Henry James's prescription of the week following our meeting, without warning he called for me at my novelist as he foundhim in Flaubert, who 'was born a novelist, grew home and invited p1e to spend the afternoon and evening with him, up, lived, died "a novelist, breathing, feeling, thinking, speaking, for it was his day off. It took me some time to realise that he knew petformingevery action of his life only as that votary.' As I met more almost no one in Birmingham, though it was his native city. He was novelists, men and women of the calibre of Graham Greene and lonely, he was also cock-a-hoop, for he had become successful very Elizabeth Bowen, I learnt that James's prescription was one which all suddenly. Entirely unknown, he had been published by the Hogarth good" novelists fell into, as though without a passionate seriousness, a Press. According to Leonard Woolfs autobiography, Saturday Night total dedication, the practice of the novelist's craft was impossible. It was one of the most successful books the Press published. It had was from John that I first realised this, and it was all-important not brought John into contact with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, both of only to me as an aspiring novelist but also as a corrective to my whom he idolised, and had brought him the friendship of Forster, overweeningly literary education and literary view of life. whom he adored. No wonder he had become arrogant, and the He introduced me to a new world. He could tell me, from first­ arrogance was intensified by the fact that he had no one with whom he hand knowledge, of Bloomsbury and not only of the great figures, b';'t could share his success. In a way, I now think, this sudden success also of the comparatively minor ones like Ralph Partridge and John wasn't good for him. It led him to equate Bloomsbury with the world Morris and Leo Charlton. He could tell me the scandal and the gossip, and to overrate the nature of literary success. When after his second in other words establish for me what Lionel Trilling called 'a culture's . novel, the Woolfs stopped publishing him, he was thrown too much hum and buzz of implication'. He knew many of the younger writers on his own resources. He was anything but a commercial writer; he of the time, Graham Greene, whom he had first met at a Heinemann never mastered the crafts of journalism and writing for radio. So I party, and H. E. Bates and James Hanley and John Brophy. think he found everything after that first big success with Saturday He gave me much, and meeting me, I think, made Birmingham Night an anti-climax. That early success also, I suspect, reinforced his less bleak for him. I introduced him to my friends, to Auden and own lack of self-criticism as a writer. It is a dangerous thing to know MacNeice and Professor Dodds and to Herickx and the Melvilles, and that one is right, and I am pretty sure that he died believing that later to Birmingham journalists and to people in the BBC. Each of us justice had not been done to him. Which is perhaps only a way of as it were gave the other the freedom of himself, though I was saying that he was a very unworldly man. obviously the principal gainer. I remember haring up to London with That Thursday afternoon when he called for me was the beginning a letter of introduction from John to]. R. Ackerley, who had just of the closest friendship of my life. It is impossible for me to been appointed Literary Editor of The Listener. Ackerley was a great overestimate what lowe to John, however critical of him I may have charmer and a very handsome man, who received me in a most kindly been later. Ever afterwards, when I was in Birmingham, my Thurs­ manner. He invited me to look at the books and pick out one I'd like days were spent with John. That first Thursday set the pattern. I had to review. It was the first Literary Editor's office I had been in, and I I :i no money, or not much more than half a crown, and I realised that was shy and impressed, mainly conscious of my lack of qualifications that was immaterial. We went straight to the Birmingham Library, for reviewing anything. I saw nothing on the shelves I could write a which was much like the London Library though smaller and half a word on, yet as I looked it became more and more a point of honour century older. John took out all the books he was allowed. Then we not to depart without something. There was a book on the Jacobean went to Boot's Library, where he took out more books, novels mainly. dramatist John Ford, very much an academic thesis. Ackerley seemed Then we went to a cafe for tea and to a pub when pubs opened and at. surprised when I took it down but made no comment. My review of it seven-thirty to the Burlington for dinner. He was not a food and wine duly appeared. I think it was adequate. I had been helped by the fact snob but he took food and wine seriously. And on occasion we went to that there was no reference in the book to T. S. Eliot's essay on the a theatre. dramatist. We talked of everything under the sun but mainly of writing and of For the next decade Ackerley sent me occasional books. I never 62 63 knew him well, for I was inhibited by his good looks, among other Birmingham. Night and Day survived about a year and then it was things. He had written a fine play on the first world war called shot down under Graham. As film critic, he was sued for libel by an Prisoners o/War and an extremely amusing travel book, Hindoo Holi­ American film company for something he had written about young day. As Literary Editor; he did as much as anyone for English poetry Miss Shirley Temple: Graham was not in court, and the judge, I seem in the Thirties and Forties. He was also a' notable eccentric. A story I to remember, demanded, 'Where is this Mr Graham Greene?' He was treasure is of his being in Harrods one day standing behind an in Mexico writing The Lawless Roads and gathering material for The upper-class woman who was bullying the assistant. Everyone waiting . Power and the Glory. . was embarrassed and impatient, and after a time Joe could stand it no It was at Four Ashes that I first met Forster and William Plomer. longer. He stepped forwards and said: 'Go away, you silly old woman. PI orner , who in his last years seemed something of a Grand Old Man You smell.' or a universal uncle and is now better known as a poet than a Ironically, his posthumous autobiography My Father's Son did him prose-writer, was then a chubby, dandyish, bland young man still not great harm. It is entirely frank and utterly fascinating but the work of far removed in time from his experiences in South Mrica. His urban­ a.J..,ortuted man. The self-portrait Ackerley presents is distorted; the ity was at odds with the ferocity of his writing. His early novels and reader who knew him only through his book could only see him as a short stories, Turbott Wolfe, I Speak of Africa and A Child of Queen compulsively homosexual chaser of guardsmen and sailors, which, Victoria, were wholly intransigent attacks on the Afrikaner ideology while no doubt true, was far from being the whole truth. Of his work later expressed in the doctrine of apartheid. If, as I think, he never as editor and writer nothing was said at all in the book. One might fulfilled his early promise, it was because he was a man who needed have expected the reviewers to correct the version he gave of himself. the stimulus of hatred, of hatred of cruelty and injustice and of those None did. Most of them were probably too young to have known him, who perpetrated them. In England, he could not find it: he found but some should have known better, Auden, for instance, who instead the liberalism of E. M. Forster, who was a close friend, and reviewed the book in the New York Review. Beyond those I have Bloomsbury. But his early books seem to me seminal in South Mrican already mentioned, I have my own reasons for being grateful to writing, in which he is a father-figure. He was a most agreeable man Ackerley. One night in 1943 I dreamed a poem; or rather I awoke and a great wit. I remember one wet Saturday night, when he was from sleep with an image in my mind that I knew contained a poem. I staying at Four Ashes, conducting him across Birmingham to see worked the poem out and sent it to Henty Reed for his opinion. Some Gordon Herickx's sculpture. It was the first time he had been in days later, I had a proof of the poem from The Listener with a note by Birmingham, and as we stood in the rain in New Street waiting for Ackerley to the effect that Henry had sent the poem to him. He had our bus, he marvelled at the size and bustle of the city. He recited the improved it, he thought, but if! didn't agree he would have the piece destinations as they were announced on the front of the buses. They set up as I'd written it. Ackerley's version was much superior to mine: seemed to fascinate him. A number 12A as it may haye been came into it was the poem I had had in mind but was too incompetent techni­ view, and he declaimed the legend it bore: 'World's End Via Lakey cally to achieve. Lane'. 'Pure Auden,' was his comment. It was John also who provided me with a letter of introduction to He was an intensely private person and almost impossible to reach Graham Greene. He was editing a magazine called Night and Day, because he lived outside Brighton and refused to be on the telephone. which was an attempt at a London version of the New Yorker. It was I saw him only rarely but once j on the occasion of the publication of very lively: Evelyn Waugh reviewed new novels, Elizabeth Bowen his novel Museum Piece, broadcast a survey of his work. After this, for was the dramatic critic, Graham himself covered new films. V. S. years I had a Christmas card from him, usually in the form of an Pritchett's short stories appeared in it, and there were things that Edwardian picture-postcard, of which he had a rich collection. seemed somewhat odd. Louis MacNeice reported Rugby football, and Forster I used to run into often when I lived in London before the also dog-racing; William Plomer was all-in wrestling correspondent. war. He was living in Brunswick Square, and we used to meet on the I set myself up as the soccer expert with an article on Aston Villa, last underground train to Russell Square station. We'd walk together tracing its origins to the bible class of Aston Villa Wesleyan Chapel, as far as his flat. He'd sometimes ask me in for a nightcap. On one 64 65 occasion, I remember, the telephone rang and he had to go into already old, and I thought he would not remember me. The first time another room to answer it. He was away so long that I was able to read was at a lunch for John Lehmann after he had given up his publishing his copy ofT. E. Lawrence's The Mint, which had just appeared in a firm. It was in a private room at the Trocadero and it was organised by private edition. Once he apologised for not being able to invite me in; Henry Green, who told me hehad done some research and discovered he had Plomer staying with him, and Plomer was sick. . that this was the first time writers had banded together to honour an This must have been some time after I went to Abinger Hammer editor since Leigh Hunt had come out of prison for libelling the with John for the first performance of Forster's pageant England's Prince Regent. We were in a room opposite one in which the Green and Pleasant Land. We were invited by Forster's mother to members of an ironmongers' trade association were lunching, and sherry. She had the reputation of being a battle-axe. So, I must admit, ironmongers kept drifting into our luncheon as we did into theirs. I she struck me. recall nothing of the lunch which cost 18/6, except that Forster was Forster was a great man who deliberately refused to be great. In present and didn't speak, that T. S. Eliot did and made it seem that as appearance he was the least obvious great man one could meet. With poet, editor and publisher Lehmann was altogether his superior, and his not-too-carefully trimmed moustache, steel-rimmed spectacles that towards the end of the meal Cyril Connolly complained loudly: and shabby old raincoat, he appeared almost a parody of the affection­ 'We've had the sixpennyworth. When do the eighteen shillings' ately regarded schoolmaster who will never become a housemaster begin?' because he cannot keep discipline. This, of course, was totally decep­ Years after that I saw Forster for the last time, and it remains my tive. In terms of influence upon the young in the Twenties and strongest memory of him. It was in the lobby of the Old Bailey at the particularly the Thirties, he was the English counterpart of Andre beginning of the Lady Chatterley'S Lover case. I was one of the witnesses Gide, a disruptive influence or, if you prefer it, a great liberator. He for the defence and so was Forster . We were not allowed in court till was the great exemplar of the Thirties virtues as they appear, for we had given evidence. Suddenly Forster appeared; he slipped into his instance, in Auden's poetry and Isherwood's novels. He was com­ place among us as it were silently and anonymously. He was wearing a pletely without side of any kind: 'An "I" can never be a great man' was cloth cap and his old raincoat. He sat down on a bench, pulled a the first line of one of Stephen Spender's early poems: he might have Penguin from his pocket and began to read. We were all, I think, had Forster, who was obviously not an T, in mind. I planned at one abashed by his presence. A legendary figure was among us. He was so time, before I had published a novel or gone to live in London, to famous, so old, -he was 79 and had travelled up from Cambridge that write a critical book on Forster, for then none existed. I felt I should morning - and so utterly without pretensions. We didn't wish to acquaint him with my plans and as~ him permission. He replied that crash in on his privacy, but it seems to me now that only one among us Rose Macaulay was currently writing a book on him (it was not in fact behaved with decent adequacy. Rupert Hart-Davis came into the very good) and he did not think the market would stand two books on lobby and sat down beside Forster, welcoming him. him. I wrote a review later of Two Cheers/or Democracy for an under­ He was one of the first witnesses to be called. The policeman at the graduate magazine; it was full of forebodings of the coming war. door of the court bellowed 'Mr Foster'. He took his stand in the Forster wrote to me about it, saying that though we were not witness-box and made, one was told, a great impression on the jury, immortal, we had to live as though we were. I think of him with of whom it is possible that not all of its members had a clear idea who affection. I remember running into him once in the spring of 1939 in he was and quite likely that none had read his novels. He was treated Waterloo Place as I was coming out of the MGM offices. He stopped with great deference by the court; there seems to have been a feeling and chatted. I said I read for MGM. Whether one confession spurred that it was honoured by his presence. No doubt he spoke softly and on another I do not know, but he said: T m walking across the Park to without fuss as the great man in the shabby raincoat who refused to be lunch with Willie Maugham. I do so whenever he's in Londor. .' Then a great man giving his testimony to a greater novelist. He disappeared it was as though he were assailed by sudden doubt. He thought and from the court as suddenly and swiftly as he had appeared. then he said: 'I can't think why.' He stood for liberal values and the holiness of the heart's affections. I saw him only twice after the war and did not speak to him. He was Among younger writers, his influence - it was of attitude not of 66 67 technique - was enormous. Outside literary circles he was always control his sleep. I was with him in Regent Street one evening when being confused with C. S. Forester, an honourable writer but not as he went to sleep walking and walked into a lamp standard. That woke good as Forster. A story is told of the BBC announcer who introduced him up. We went into the Cafe Royal. He put his arms on the table him once at the microphone and after the broadcast produced one of and his head on tpemand slept. It was my task to persuade the waiter the Hornblower books for his signature. . that'he wasn't drunk and hadn't passed out but that sleep was simply Sometime in 1934 John and I were often joined in oui:' Thursday . not' in his control. . meetings at the pub in Martineau Street which we visited every week Before-! met him he had been a racing motor cyclist. His condition by two other young writers, Peter Chamberlain and Leslie Halward, had forced him to give that up. His ambition, if there was a war, was who were both some four or five years younger than John and some to join the Army as a motor cycling instructor, which carried with it four or five years older than I. The man who brought us together was the rank of sergeant, and remarkably enough, when war broke out he E. J. O'Brien, who edited an annual volume called The Best Short did exactly that. His disease was unspotted at the medical examina­ Stories of 19-and was the chairman of the editorial board of a newly tion, and he successfully hid it throughout the war. founded little magazine called English Story for which we all wrote. Leslie Halward was a complete contrast to Peter. He was pure Finding the four of us from Birmingham in his magazine, Edward had Brummie, speaking no other tongue than the Birmingham accent, invented something he called the Birmingham Group and he added to the product of working-class Birmingham, in a district of which his our number by including in it two young men from Derbyshire, father had kept a pork butcher's shop. Leslie as a boy had worked as a Walter Brierley and Hedley Carter. pork butcher, had then served an apprenticeship as a toolmaker and, Chamberlain came of a wealthy Birmingham family of bedstead when the depression ended his engineering, had become a plasterer on manufacturers. He had been to school at Clifton and on our first building sites. At first glance, he struck you as sullen, from a meeting seemed to me very much the public school man, by which I combination, I think, of his accent, the seemingly unhealthy urbaQ mean that I found him arrogant. He was a large man, tall and broad, pallor of his skin, and a broken nose he had acquired as an amateur who looked as though he would have become fat and flabby in later boxer. I am pretty certain that his first impulse was to react against years. I did not think we could have very much in common, he was so the rest of us. He had had very little education and had remained obviously a man of a quite different world. He knew London at least as thoroughly working-class as if he gloried in being so, though, I welhs he did Birmingham and he had his own circle there. He knew s~spect, as much our of fear of the ways of life outside the working writers: he had met Anthony Powell and told me of the cocktail party class. Somehow - and this seems to me verging on the miracuious - he Powell had given for the people he had, unknown to them, put in his had discovered the stories of Chekhov, and Lawrence apart, his stories novels. Peter's literary heroes were the Americans, Hemingway and of working-class life collected in the two volumes To Tea on Sunday Fitzgerald especially, and it was from him that I first heard of John and Arch Anderson, seem to me without rival in British English. For a O'Hara. He lent me Appointment in Samarra and The Doctor's Son. He few years in the Thirties, he was naturally and properly much was, I thought, a bit smug. He had written a very short, astonish­ -':- admired. He was thought of, of course, as a proletarian writer, but I ingly fresh story called What the Sweet Hell. It was published in the am sure that meant nothing to him. He was as unpolitical a man as I New Statesman, and on the Monday after publication a postcard arrived have ever met, as much likely, I think, to vote Conservative as there saying the story was the most original thing the writer of the Labour. postcard had read for several years. The writer' of the postcard was Within his limits he was a wholly admirable writer, but his limits 1. A. Richards. I think now that Peter had good reason to be smug. were very narrow, and lack of education seems to have prevented him I remember too, that when his first novel, Sing Holiday, was from broadening them. For two or three years, with a sympathetic accepted by Chatto and Windus he said, with what seemed to me publisher and two or three editors behind him, he rode the crest'of the maddening complacency, 'Well, you can't do better than the best, wave. He got married and went to live in a farm labourer's cottage in can you?' Worcestershire which he called 0 Providence after John's novel, He suffered from narcolepsy. In the simplest terms he could not partly as an expression of gratitude to John and partly because the 68 69 him. It lay among my shirts and socks in a book-jacket of Son of the Morning: A Life of Nietzsche by Edward J. O'Brien. Nietzsche attracted no attenion. Two other books did, America Faces the Barricades by John Spivak, which was a present for a friend, and a new anthology, Proletarian Literature in the United States, which I VI had bought for myself out of sheer interest. These were borrie away to a room behind the trestle tables, from which two gentlemen in bowler hats and civilian clothes presently emerged. They held the books in their hands. They were very polite. Why did I have these books, these in particular? Was I aware who Spivak was? All I knew of him was what it said on the blurb. Thetwo men smiled at me pityingly. He was, they said, a notorious agitator. They wrote down my answers in a black notebook. I assured them that I had no interest in the English I' took it for granted that, back home, I should take up my life as publication of the books. The following week, of course, Proletarian freelance journalist again and so I did, but in a way I had not expected. Literature in the United States appeared in London, without any help Herbert S. Cater, for whom I had bought Spivak's America Faces the from me, published by Lawrence and Wishart. The books were Barricades, suggested I should join him in a sort of partnership. He returned to me, and I found the boat-train had been held back for me. would provide me with a room in his office, a typewriter and all From that time on, the customs officer's remark in Vile Bodies has had necessary equipment, a telephone, the use of his quite sizeable library a special savour: 'Very hot against literature the Home Secretary is.' of reference books, his store of press-cuttings and his professional I got into Birmingham just after nine that evening. I'd worked it advice, and I would· write articles that he would market. We would out that when I'd paid off the taxi-driver I'd have five shillings. I was take a fifty-fifty split of everything sold and he would guarantee me a helping the cabman strap my trunk on tohis luggage rack when a man minimum of £3 a week. I accepted like a shot, without attempting to who had been a student with me and whom I had not seen since determine which of us had the better of the bargain, if bargain it was. university days, came over and said, 'Where have you come from?' What interested me was the assured £3 a week. I'm pretty sure Kay 'America,' I replied. He gave me a long look and said: 'You bloody did not lose by the deal, even if he did not gain as much as he might liar. ' reasonably have expected, for I could have applied myself much harder than I did without turning myself into a human battery-hen. I was not interested in money beyond my immediate needs, and the journalism I was practising, which I found only briefly and sporadi­ cally amusing, I saw essentially as a crutch to enable me to write my novel. I don't, in fact, think Kay ever seriously expected to reap' profit from me. I was, indeed, only 'the first of three or four young men he helped in this way. He was, I think, a man of great generous impulses who could yield to them only if he persuaded himself they might be a source of profit for him. So, later, he insisted on paying for the typing of my novel in return for the manuscript, which, conceivably, might one day be valuable. I had met him when I was an undergraduate through a young man I knew who was a reporter on one of the local papers. He was a dozen or so years older than I, had served through the war in the trenches and in 1928 or 1929 had written a war novel that was never published. I 88 89 liked him enormously, forhe was stimulating and rose to ideas like a write a series of articles on what the provinces were thinking. Kay fish to a fly. He reminded me in some ways of Bennett, both the represented the paper in Birmingham and had to arrange Cummings's Bennett who preached the acceptance oflife as something to be made interviews there. These were to be with representative business men, the best of and the Bennett who wrote those maddening little primers representative trade unionists, representatives of university opinion, Mental Efficiency and Self and Self-Management. He saw himself as a and so on. Kay said to me: 'You can be the educated young.' hard-headed man of business , and in some ways, I think, me as a good . The evening came when I was to be interviewed. In the lounge of man who had fallen among aesthetes and intellectuals, much as Lenin the Midland Hotel, I made myself known to Cummings, who sat me saw Shaw as a good man fallen among Fabians. At the same time, I d~wn, pressed the bell for the waiter and ordered drinks for us. I sat think I represented a path he himself might have taken had it not been back and waited to be interviewed. He talked about himself. He had for the war, a path he still had a hankering after. recently interviewed Stalin and was full of it. He poured scorn on H. To me, he looked anything but a journalist. His Devon origins G. Wells's interview with Stalin. He said: 'The difference between H. showed in his speech, and his heavy build and ruddy cheeks suggested G. Wells and me is that H. G. sits on his arseall day.' I wondered, as I a farmer, though this is immediately contradicted by my abiding still do, at his nerve in seriously comparing himself with Wells. He memory of him. He is at his typewriter and has just rushed into the went on to tell me how, before he was President, Roosevelt had office to meet a deadline so imminent that he has had time. to do no entertained him on his yacht and how he, Cummings, had outlined to more than unbutton his raincoat and push his trilby hat to the back of Roosevelt the principles of the New Deal. All this with great solem­ his head. It is obvious that he will be rushing off to another assign­ nity. In the two hours I was with him, he did not ask me anything. ment as soon as this is finished. But the ash on the cigarette stuck to later, he told us, through the News Chronicle, what the educated his lower lip is over an inch long, and he has, in fact, been at the young were thinking. From all of which I learned one thing, which typewriter all morning. His appearance belies him. He is essentially a the experiences of later life have reinforced: that it is the besetting sin daily newspaperman, for whom the passing moment is everything of successful journalists to confuse themselves with their by-lines. and willing self-deception part of his stock-in-trade. . I resumed my Thursday-evening meetings with Hampson and on a He had served his apprenticeship on the weekly newspaper in Saturday morning very soon after I joined Kay ran into MacNeice in a Devon edited by the father ofW. N. P. Barbellion, the author of The bookshop. I did not know whether he would remember me, but he Journal ofa Disappointed Man, whom he had known and, I think.' ~een c1me over and asked me about America. We chatted for a few minutes influenced by. He had come to Birmingham after the war .aI'l~ jomed and then, abruptly, he switched off, as it were, turned on his heel and one of the local papers. He had lost his job in a re-orgaOlsatlOn an~ walked out of the shop. I was struck with consternation: unwittingly, rationalisation of one of the groups. Immediately, he had set up hIS I must have offended him. I had encountered what I later found was own news agency, to which he brought a ferocious energy and an MacNeice's common way with people he'didnot know well. I need uncanny nose for a news-story. By the time I joined him, he occupied not have worried, for I found myself again in his company within a one floor in an old office-building round the corner from the Law matter of days. He had become very friendly with Reggie Smith, who Courts and employed seven or eight young reporters. was still a student at the university. How Reggie appeared to him at I was with Kay for the best part of two years, until my novel found a this time comes out very vividly in his long autobiographical frag­ publisher and I followed it to London. I enjoyed my association with ment written in 1940, The Strings are False, him and the daily discussions we had on almost every subject under I had run into Louis at a time when, as he says, he 'began to go out a the sun. Journalistically, our ideal was very much the Daily Express of great deal and discovered Birmingham'. Until then his life in Bir­ the day as represented by Tom Driberg's William Hickey page. I mingham h~d been spent in a cocoon of early-married domesticity. produced a seemingly endless supply of Driberg-Ii~e gos~ip para­ Now, his first wife, whom I never met, had suddenly left him for an graphs for the Birmingham papers. But the appeal of journ\illsm as an American. One effect of this on Louis seems to have been to bring him end in itself was wearing very thin. Sometime in.the first half of 1937, to life in a way he had not known before. This sense of a new life all A. J. Cummings, the star writer of the News Chronicle, decided to about him can be felt strongly in the verse he was writing at this time 90 91 and which he gathered together in Poems, published in 1935, the impressed me enormously. There seemed to be all the Greek, Latin collection which made his reputation. It can be felt, for example, in and English poets, all the literary critics, a formidable array of the the poem 'Birmingham', which showed moe a city whose existence I works of philosophy, psychology, anthropology and sociology I. A. had not suspected" a city enormously exotic and glamorous, though I Richards was editing for Kegan Paul, besides a fascinating assortment could see that the exoticism and the glamour were truly properties of of~ovels and miscellaneous books. And the like of his collection of scenes and places I had known all my life. gramophone records I had' not seen. DOl,lbtless there was classical Birmingham was not the only industrial city Louis had known. He music in it, but what excited me were the early jazz, the Irish jigs and had known Belfast from his childhood, and in my view Belfast was the music hall songs. One in particular caught my fancy. It ran and is uglier and grimmer. I suspect that his attitude towards Belfast something like: 'Here we are at duh palais de dance To trip duh light was more ambivalent, for it was at once home to him and alien. He fantastic. Say what comes here? A classy dame Chewing a hunk 0' thought of himself as an Irishman rather than an Ulsterman. Though pulastic. Say she look duh goods to me', and so on in demotic his father was a bishop of the Church ofIreland, he came from the west - American. It was sung, I think, by Eileen Stanley. I was having, it and both he and Louis were opposed to the Ulster ascendancy, to Lord seems to me, a glimpse of the Twenties, of the first decade of the Craig avon , Stormont and the Orange order, to all those things Sitwells and the world encapsulated in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. symbolised by Protestant Belfast. By contrast, Birmingham pre­ That evening, too, I must have met Betsy for the first time. Betsy sented no threats. In appearance and attitudes, Louis was both an was a very handsome Borzoi bitch and one of the hazards of visiting aristocrat and a peasant, as no Englishman can be, and in social Louis. She had the habit of poking her long snout into the private attitudes he was the most democratic of men. He became friends with parts of his guests, behaviour which seemed to amuse him rather than the workmen who from time to time did jobs at his flat. There was a not. I had the feeling that he saw one's reaction to Betsy as a test one young electrician, I remember, with whom he often went drinking; passed or dicl not pass. They made a splendid couple when they were the man was an ardent pigeon-fancier, and this, no doubt, was part of out together and I can only suppose she was an aspect of his vanity. He the attraction, for Louis loved all skills and specialised knowledge. He assured me she was very stupid. In his poems she is compared to a film often wore on his face the'expression I associate with him many years star. later; with him as one would see him standing at the bar of the George Louis was one of the most silent of men. He very rarely talked about in Great Portland Street, a rendezvous ofBBC men and radio-actors; poetry, his own or other men's, unless it was to elicit information, as standing there one of a group but in it rather than of it, his mouth once in London when writing Autumn Journal he telephoned me for lifted in a half-smile~ half-snarl, of incredulous delight at the com­ the names of the constituencies of the Birmingham Labour members, pany with whom he was finding himself. He was always somewhat information which in the event he did not use. He confined his detached from the company he was with, an outsider, a chiel among comments on other writers and other art forms to curt expressions of them taking notes. I think this stemmed from his being an Irishman approval or its opposite. He was a man with whom one could sit for who after infancy had spent his life among the English, with whom he hours in companionable silence interrupted from time to time by a could never wholly identify himself, though he was anything but a 'What's old So-and-So up to now?' to which the answer was generally narrow nationalist, except possibly when drunk. 'Oh, the usual' or 'Much the same'. He was very fond of the prefix Now, his marriage broken up, he discovered Birmingham. He was 'old'. Auden was always 'old Wystan' and Spender 'old Stephen'. The still living where he had always lived in the city, in the flat above the word seemed to comprise both -affection and appreciation of a rare - coach-house at Highfield, Philip Sargant Florence's house. I recall, phenomenon. the first time I was in his flat, being surprised and I fancy a little In the autumn of 1936 Louis was appointed lecturer in classics in shocked by the way in which the furniture, chairs, tables, wardrobes, Bedford College, London, and his Birmingham period ended with a - had been painted in patterns and curlicues of bright pinks and greens spectacular party which began at about nine of a Saturday evening and and blues. I suppose I found it too frivolous for- my taste; one felt in for some of us, Louis included, did not end until more than twenty~ the world of Russian ballet. I was more at home with his books, which four hours later. My memories of the party are appropriately hazy. 92 93 Professor and Mrs Dodds were there at the beginning and so was died in his sleep that night. In his lifetime, he was practically Auden, with whom Louis had recently visited Iceland. They did not unknown, and I suppose he is entirely so today. I hope the Birming­ stay long. Those who came from London induded Spender, Rupert ham Art Gallery at least has some of his work. Doone, the director of the Group Theatre, which had recently staged Early on the SiInday morning after Louis' party, I remember that Auden's and Isherwood's The Dog Beneath the Skin and was soon to do . Rupert Doone and Medley went into Selly Oak village in search of Louis's translation of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, and the painter . eggs for breakfast, after which they and the other guests from London Robert Medley. I remember Doone, at one point during the night, left. A day or two later, louis left too. I followed him two or three sitting cross-legged on the floor and reiterating with great impres­ months later. But not before I had gone to London one Sunday to see siveness, 'The theatre is like a basket of eggs: you take some out and the Group Theatre production of his play Out ofthe Picture. I am afraid you put some in.' I remember someone, for reasons best known to it was not a good play. I think he would have preferred success in the himself, throwing a glass of brandy on to the fire and a jet of flame theatre to almost anything, and he wrote three or four plays, only one shooting out and scorching the backside of the person standing in of which achieved professional production, in Dublin after his death. front of it, who I have always believed was Henry Reed. And I The theatre of the ;rhirties and Forties was not interested in the kind remember, as we woke up at first light from our impromptu beds on of thing he had to offer. He needed something less naturalistically­ couches and blankets strewn on the floor, seeing Gordon Herickx dominated than existed then, and by the Fifties, by which time the standing at the window and surveying the grounds of Highfield, theatre had taken a different path, his passion for the drama had been which must have been two or three acres in extent, and saying at least partly satisfied by the demands made upon him by the radio meditatively to himself: 'So this is how the poor live!' play. Herickx must have a paragraph to himself. Sculpture was his I did, in fact, before leaving for London, take a small part in one of passion and his vocation. He was tall, blond, ruddy and almost totally Louis' plays, Station Bell, which Reggie Smith produced for the hairless. His output was small, for sculpture is the most expensive of University Dramatic society. As I remember it, it was very funny. At pursuits for a working-class man. The cost of stone is prohibitive, as is the time, I believe Louis had hopes of its being put on at the Old Vic. the cost of transporting wotkfor exhibition; and he was married, with It was never published and had disappeared from the MacNeice canon two or three small children. He was, besides, interested in many until I mentioned it in an article in the New Statesman, after which E. things, in films especially. He read widely and discussed what R. Dodds traced the typescript of it to the library of the University of interested him with wit and zest. He had an engaging gay seriousness Texas. and he seemed always to be seeing himself from a slight, half-comic Which reminds me that I took part in what I think was the first angle. I remember him saying earnestly to me once, in his perceptible public reading of The Ascent of F6, at one of the University English Birmingham accent, of Wyndham Lewis: 'You know, kid, I like Club's fortnightly meetings. Auden took charge, distributed the Lewis. I always think he's read the same sixpenny books as I have.' scripts and alloted the parts. We read at sight. I remember how Auden and MacNeice admired his sculpture and tried, in vain, to astonished and impressed we were when, the reading ended, Auden interest their wealthy friends in it. He did some beautiful work based went round the tiny audience ofperhaps forty undergraduates literally on the structure offlowers; there was a piece called 'Chestnut Bud' and with a hat, saying that the labourer was worthy of his hire and that another called 'Cyclamen', and before them he had done a stylised nothing should ever be given free. Iris conceivable he pocketed fifteen figure, which I saw only in photographs, called 'Unemployed Man'; it shillings. was shown in the Soviet Union, whence he never recovered it. And he Suddenly my novel, Innocence is Drowned, found a publisher. I never did a remarkable portrait head ofJohn Hampson. He had one London doubted it would, but for a year it had been floating round London in show, soon after the war. He was vastly excited, for he had waited for a progress slow, stately and tortuous. It had been rejected by nine it for years. We wanted to give a party for him after the private view, publishers, six of whom had returned it with letters saying that in less but he could not be induced to stay the night in iondon and insisted depressed times they would have accepted it and two of whom sent on getting into his car and driving straight back to Birmingham. He copies of their readers' reports, which were glowing, and invited me 94 95 I to meet them to discuss my future plans. But it seemed to have taken adviser, which I was for more than ten years. He told me who had read each of them at least six weeks to have it read and to make up his mind my novel for him: Derek Verschoyle, the literary editor of the about it, and here was the tenth, Michael Joseph, accepting it after Spectator. Unscrupulously, I called on him next and asked for review­ having it only ten days. He stated his terms: he would pay £25 in ing. I went away 'with the latest Thurber, and thereafter Verschoyle advance of royalties. I didn't quibble but accepted by return of post, sent· me books on occasion. told Kay I was leaving him, and set about making plans to go to Later in the week, O'Brien took me to lunch at the Cafe Royal, add london. But the plans had all been made. I even had a pretty good . ( . I became· reader for MGM and thereby wh'at was almost the lowest idea where I would live, in the beginning anyway. Weekly, there form of literary life in London, though I am sure that O'Brien, who appeared a 'small' in the Daily Telegraph's column of furnished flats to . was a kindly man, saw his position as giving him an opportunity to let beginning 'A Hundred Little Homes', announcing completely help young writers. He told me how the job of story editor had come equipped furnished rooms to let for fifteen shillings a week. They his way. There had been a highly successful play on Broadway called sounded grisly enough, but I doubted whether anything cheaper Boy Meets Girl, in which one of the characters, a highbrow short-story could be had, and besides, they were in Regent Square, which my A to writer, declares that ifhe doesn't get into the next edition of O'Brien's Z showed was in Bloomsbury, half a mile from Euston Station. annual anthology he'll give up art and go to Hollywood as a script­ I wrote to Edward O'Brien and by return heard from him that he'd writer. 'Who's this guy O'Brien?' asked the MGM scouts at the first just been appointed story editor of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer British night, and the same question was repeated in the higher circles of Studios and could let me have reading. Within ten days of Joseph's Culver City. And one day O'Brien looked o·ut of his cottage window accepting my novel, I was installed in Regent Square, which like near Oxford to find the lane outside blocked by an enormous much of Bloomsbury seemed Bloomsbury only by courtesy, though limousine. It was MGM come to offer him a job, and he suddenly local folklore claimed Aldous Huxley had once lived in it, and just off found himself earning £5,000 a year. It was ironical that his all­ it, I found, was the street where, on Tuesday afternoons turn-and­ consuming zeal for the short story as an art form should have been thus turn-about with Festing Jones, Samuel Butler visited his French rewarded. It forced him into a continual compromise with commer­ prostitute. cialism. I remember he spoke ofMaugham with distaste, almost even The room I had was small and crowded, understandably so, for it of moral disapproval, as of one who had knowingly perverted his contained a sink and a gas cooker behind a screen and a settee which talent. But it was an attitude less and less easily held. I went into the you converted into a double bed. Before a month was out, I had MGM office one afternoon and asked to see him. I was given the transferred myself to another much larger room on the other side of routine answer: Mr O'Brien would be free in five minutes; would I the square, for which I paid nineteen shillings. take a seat? I did so, and immediately someone else came in, asked for Having taken the room, the first thing I did was to go to Henrietta Edward and was straight away ushered into the presence. The fleshy Street, Covent Garden, to meet Michael Joseph in his office. He was beak of the newcomer was unmistakable, and I reconciled myself to in his first season as a publisher, but I had known his name for several wait. Forty minutes later, the man was ceremoniously conducted years as that of the author ofJournalism for Profit and Short-Story­ through the reception room by Edward himself. He beckoned me into Writingfor Profit, books I tended to look down my nose at. He was a his office. 'You know who that was.?' he asked in a respectful voice. man with a clipped military moustache - after the first war he had 'Hugh Walpole, wasn't it?' I answered. Edward nodded and said, been demobilised as the youngest captain in the British Army - and a very seriously: 'He asked who you were.' I had, I was given to flattened nose that had been broken in a boxing match. He spoke with understand, been blessed from afar. I wondered why Edward should military briskness. He told me precisely how many copies my novel have been so impressed by Walpole and why he should expect me to would sell: 420. In fact, it sold one less. I enquired what the prospects be, until I realised that Walpole was one of MGM's most mustrious were of reading for publishers. That was no way to get rich, he said, assets. Had he not, in addition to his reputation as a bestselling but, if I liked, he'd let me have a manuscript from time to time. novelist, even appeared in David Copperfield? His name on the pay-roll Indeed, he did so and after the war invited me to be his literary signified the approval of Film by Literature. 96 97

I in his capacity as Professor of English, that the RAF was calling for research student in metallurgy. He was now director of a research and volunteers to learn Japanese. The invitation was for 'recent' gradu­ development organisation. We talked, and by the end of the meal I ates, and I was scarcely that; nor did I have either linguistic capacity had been offered and had accepted a job with him as a technical writer. or secret ambition to learn Japanese. But the notion seemed to faU I spent the rest of die war translHenry Moore was a comparably with the Daily Express or Vogue, but by 1946 I knew by charlatan, this on the strength of the holes that appear in some of his experience that its payment of reviewing was higher than that of the sculptures. It was not, I imagine, a view he held for long, for he Spectator, Time and Tide or the Listener. I knew enough to discount the moved habitually among men and women of much greater sensibility received view. At about this time I was invited to contribute to a new, than himself and he was, I think, a genuinely humble man. As soon as rather expensive periodical called Contact and I was called in to meet he knew that Morgan Forster or Leonard Woolf approved of a writer, the editor, who was a man called George Weidenfeld, a name which he was happy to approve too. Forster and the Woolfs, along with meant nothing to me. At the end of our conversation, he said, a trifle Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey, were sacred cows, and I remember smugly, I thought: 'I think you'll find we pay rather better than the how disturbed he was when John Raymond attacked Strachey in a Statesman.' I was not surprised when this proved not the least true. 'Books in General' article. Whatever had come over John? he asked All the same, a policy of stinginess and cheese-paring was associ­ me anxiously, knowing I was a close friend. It plainly seemed to ated with the Statesman and therefore with Kingsley. When he took Kingsley a monstrous, well-nigh blasphemous article. I more or less over the editorship, this was probably necessary, but in the latter agreed w!th it. Fortunately, I was aSle to say it was a reputable view, years of his editorship the paper can have been anything but poor. It because It was F. R. Leavi~'s, and I think Kingsley was a little had, in fact, attained a prosperity Kingsley had great difficulty in 176 177 believing and did not trust, and contributors' rates and staff­ he had walked home to his flat at Charing Cross from his club at half members' expenses continued to be rigorously scrutinised. This was past eleven the night before. He had stopped to look at the goods in a in line with the paper's traditions, part of which was that payment~ shop-window in New Bond Street, an incident revealing, I thought, was the last thing contributors expected. It had begun as a politically considerable depths of innocence, especially since recounted quite radical, missionary journal, and some of its early contributors, Shaw unselfconsciously. The inevitable happened: a tart had come up and and Bennett among them, one was given to understand; had always said: 'Are you coming home with me, darling?' Kingsley had replied: refused payment. Similarly, it was taken for granted - and experience 'Oh, I couLdn't do a thing like that.' 'Why ever not?' asked the girl. over the years had helped to confirm it - that the turnover of . 'And do you know?' Kingsley said, with considerable astonishment, contributors to the literary and arts pages was large and that as soon as 'I couldn't think of a single reason I could give her.' a young man had made his mark there he would move on and be The other time, he was expressing his envy of those people who snapped up by the Sunday Times or the Observer. were not oppressed by conscience, who lived free from feelings of This unformulated but strongly felt tradition I have no doubt guilt. He had never found this possible, and as the man he especially Kingsley sometimes exploited, as I have no doubt it was a bad admired and envied in this respect he instanced Compton Mackenzie. tradition. When I joined the literary staff in 1959 Cuthbert Worslei I knew Mackenzie in much the same way as Kingsley did, and for me had just left us to become drama critic of the Financial Times. and we he was· a performer whose reminiscences and anecdotes were often were·faced with the task, which went on for months, of finding a new amusing, sometimes boring but always needed taking with a grain of critic who would not seriously let down the traditions established by salt. And I am not at all sute that he was the happy hedonist of MacCarthy and Worsley. I recall Kingsley saying to me in exaspera­ Kingsley'S imagination. Nevertheless, as a psychological type he was tion: 'I'll never understand why Cuthbert wanted to leave us!' and he different enough from Kingsley to appear his mirror-image and plainly couldn't. But I could have told him why: If Cuthbert had been therefore seductively attractive to him. For Kingsley, Mackenzie was offered a salary approaching that the Financial Times had offered him the epitome of the free spirit, one might say of the impossibly free he'd have stayed gladly. spirit. Over the years, there ~as, I think, a perceptible change in Kingsley. There can be scarcely such a person, from the nature of the trade, as I once read a book by Gilbert Murray on Liberalism which began with a representative journalist. In my time, I have thought my early the bald assertion that Liberals believe in high thinking and plain mentor H. S. Cater was one and I have thought Kingsley one as well, living, a proposition which effectively put me off Liberalism. When I and they had almost nothing in common. Kingsley had begun his first knew him, Kingsley was a Liberal in Murray's sense. He was career as a journalist, if not at the top precisely, at least in its higher always being shocked, or pretending to be shocked, by otherpeople's reaches. He had come into the profession as a Cambridge don and extravagance, by the appearance of conspicuous waste. Thus, seeing professional historian recruited by the Manchester Guardian as a George Stonier, who was a modest man, wearing a suit he hadn't leader-writer. But vastly different as he was from Kay, he shared a noticed before, he is reported to have exclaimed: 'Not another new common quality, the one which above all others is the journalist'S sine suit, George!' And Cuthbert Worsley told me of how he had once qua non: curiosity. It was not especially selective, but it. was unceas­ been complimented by Kingsley on a new shirt. Kingsley was loud in ing, and it made Kingsley as little susceptible to boredom as anyone I his admiration and enquired where he could buy one like it; until he have known. Once, when he was at a loose end one evening, he tried was told the price and was then horrified. Later, doubts seemed to to persuade me to go with him and see Agatha Christie's play The have dawned about the validity of the premises on which much of his Mouse Trap. It was then in its tenth year perhaps. Why didn't we go life had been based, and these were accompanied by feelings of and find out what accounted for its popularity? I didn't accompany bewilderment and the reluctant recognition that possibly he had been him, for, though I too was at a loose end that evening, I couldn't wrong for years. This I found endearing and disarming. conceive of its being as boring as I assumed The Mouse Trap would be. I recall two conversations I had with him in 1959 or 1960. We But Kingsley didn't find it so, even if, as I suspect, he was as much . were talking desultorily in his office one morning and he told me that interested in the audience as in the play. 178 179 His unfailing curiosity meant that it was always an adventure to be with him. The most run-of-the-mill, banal taxi-ride became excit­ ing. He seemed to enter instant rapport with the driver; within a matter of minutes, he had gauged the man's politics and views on the matters of the day, and his questions, which were uninhibited by IX self-consciousness or considerations of conventional good taste, never seemed to give offence. Which underlines the quality that seems to me most characteristic of Kingsley, an innocence that beguiled and was redeeming.

In the midst of all this activity, the circumstances of my life suddenly changed. We decided that central London was not the place in which to raise a family. We looked for somewhere to rent in the country and with great luck I found a pleasant little Georgian house in the high street of Lydd, in Romney Marsh in Kent. It was a country quite unknown to me and, though only sixty miles from London, it felt very remote. The Marsh I found enchanting. The flatness of the land, the distance of the horizon, the height of the sky and the constantly changing cloudscape gave an impression of great expanse. The feel of life was different from anything I had known before, and so were the literary associations. Looking out of my study-cum-sitting room on to the high street, with Wells's Experiment in Autobiography in mind, I could fancy that at any moment James and Gosse might pedal by on their bicycles on the way to visit Wells, less than four miles away in New Romney. This was Wells country. I could walk along the shingle beach from Dungeness to Littlestone and have a drink at the hotel where the First Men in the Moon had stayed and look out to see the spot where their balloon came down. Half a dozen miles away to the west lay Rye and Henry James's Lamb House, and not far away, the villages where Conrad, Stephen Crane and Forq Madox Ford had lived. There were more recent associations. The beaches and coast beyond Dymchurch towards Hythe were Elizabeth Bowen country: it was there that the graceless Heccombs had their bungalow 'Waikiki' in The Death of the Heart. And Dungeness, whither a secret passage from my garden, which I never found, was supposed to lead, seemed in its romantic isolation created to be the scene of a thriller that only Miss Bowen could write. No sooner were we settled at Lydd than I was invited to act as a tutor at an Oxford University summer school in twentieth-century 180 181 thousand feet up and given over, it seemed, to grazing. It was no up for lost time. There were other, incidental delights. I recall the longer warm and there were occasional flurries of snow. At night it small museum devoted to the local Indian culture. Its curator was a froze, and one was warned that ina week'stirrie the snow would set in retired professor of History in the University. He was learned in in earnest. Towns were few, widely scattered and small, scarcely more everything relating to the West, though, he said, the man who knew than a Federal post office, a couple of banks perhaps, a handful of more than anyone else about this part of America was an Englishman, stores and a cluster of houses on main street, which was the state who was out that way every year. He wonden::d whether I knew him. I highway. In its way, it seemed to me an idyllic country, less tamed "had to:adin{t I didn't but I had met him, for he was Professor John than any I had known before. One felt that here life was governed by Hawgood, of Birmingham University. the seasons and by the nature of the terrain. For some men, I could see And then - it was the crowning event of my visit to Bozeman - I that it must offer the next best thing to paradise, and I could not think was driven for a day in Yellowstone Park, which was to close at the it was by accident that the academics I met were men of the open air end of the week for the winter. In some ways, I was disappointed, for I and open spaces. Most of them seemed to have come from the East; saw no animals at all. Hibernation, I was told, had probably already they were escaped N ew Yorkers, Bostonians and Philadelphians who begun, though at the cafes and restaurants we called at we were kept and rode horses, hunted and fished, and their talk was of these assured the bears had been round the night before, prospecting, things. They seemed to have come to Montana consciously for the raiding, turning over the trash-cans in the search for food. The geysers idyllic life and they did not seem to have been disappointed. I thought alone kept their promises. But I left Yellowstone full of admiration it entirely proper that the great topic of conversation while I was on for the American national park service; and what should we see, once "campus was that the President of the University had only the other we were safely out of the park at dusk, but a herd of deer galloping day shot a bear, which in local terms appeared to be the ultimate across the cow pasture? ambition of every man. Within six months, I was in the United States again, and this time I knew that life at Bozeman would be no life for me but I could not my wife and six-year-old daughter were with me. I was fulfilling a rid myself of a grudging feeling of envy similar to that I have felt for promise I had made while at Vassar to put in some time as visiting athletes, for rugger players and boxers especially. The pleasure they professor at the University of Kansas , at Lawrence, and I had agreed to had from their pursuits was unimaginable, though I could see they go on, afterwards, to the summer session of the yniversity of got something satisJying out of their bizarre practices. Ever since Washington at Seattle. We rented an agreeable ranch-style house reading The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a sixth-former I have been about a mile from the campus and my small daughter settled down . haunted by Blake's lines: happily in second grade in the local school. How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way, I was fortunate in seeing Kansas and Washington in such close Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five? proximity in time, for the one served to set off the other. In America, I the adjective always applied to Kansas is 'corny', which according to I was envious of the worlds of delight others seemed to have and from ,I the dictionary means 'out of date, old-fashioned; trite; sentimental.' which I felt debarred, and I often wondered whether our own indi­ This means only that Kansas is a rural, even a rustic state and it vidual special isms amounted to much more than our own individual doesn't prevent the State University from being a notably distin­ imprisonments. guished one. The President of the University was accustomed in his The five days I spent at Bozeman were intensely enjoyable: they speeches to refer to Lawrence as 'this Athens on the Kaw,' the Kaw were so far removed from my ordinary life that they had the quality of being the name by which the Kansas River is known at that point. I pure holiday. The students at the" classes I took were fresh and eager so had discovered that the University had celebrated its centenary a few that I was stimulated myself: American students, who are, by and months before we arrived, which was a salutary rerriinder of how large, considerably less well prepared than their English counter­ relatively old American universities are compared with most of those. parts, are often because of this more keen and responsive, as though in England. I had also discovered before I left home that the Univer­ suddenly waking up to the pleasures oflearning and anxious to make sity and Lawrence had a surreptitious and dingy immortality in Frank 264 265 Harris's My Life and Loves. Harris, who had gone to America from a-mouldering in the grave. He was one of the great heroes and martyrs Ireland at the age of fourteen, was a Jaw student at the University in of the North; but he was also a great fanatic. He lived by the . the early eighteen-seventies, having previously been a cowboy among assumption that h.e had been chosen byGod to destroy settlers who other things. He put himself through the University by working as supported slavery. To that end, ,he murdered five of his neighbours. A night clerk at the local hotel, which even now bears the same name as year 'or so lacer, with a handful of followers he seized the U. S. it does in My Life and Loves. Outside the Law School was a statue . armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, for which act of insurrection he representing a man with a moustache standing with an arm round the was. hanged. shoulders of a younger man and gesticulating towards the frontier; a Thus, briefly, the historical background. Kansas was also the state memorial to Horace Greeley's famous 'Go West, Young Man, Go . into which emerged the Chisholm Trail, along which the grazing West,' I imagine. I put it about that it was a speaking likeness of herds of cattle were driven up froin the ranges of Texas to the railhead Harris in his student days and that he was obviously indicating to a at Kansas City. It was a state in constant touch with frontiers even neophyte in skulduggery where the pickings were. No one seemed when it was no longer itself the frontier, and in Kansas I felt in the much impressed, and when Harris's connection with the University presence of the sort of history that is recorded in the border ballads. I was known I rather gathered it wasn't in the best of taste to refer to it. saw Kansas, of course, entirely as enshrined in its principal univer­ Harris, in fact, though 110 doubt a considerable scoundrel, was also a sity, and universities, American universities especially, are never considerable journalist, and the short stories in his collections Elder representative of the values of the communities in which they have Conklin and Montes the Matador are by no means negligible studies of their being. Neverthless, I had the feeling that Kansas, by contrast life in the further Middle West and the South West in the last decades with Iowa, was still unsure of itself, unsure of its identity and still of last century. Though it is doubtless his own fault, he had not had searching for one, angrily certain, perhaps, of only one thing, the justice done to him as a writer. virtue of the Protestant ethic. At the very centre of the United States, I could scarcely be in Kansas without making mental reference to it seemed nowhere specifically and could define itself only by taking Iowa, its northern neighbour. They shared the same rolling coun­ sides, by aligning itself against somewhere else, most obviously, tryside, which had been prairie. until a hundred years ago, and the perhaps, against the state immediately across the river and its biggest people came from similar stock. Iowa achieved statehood in 1846; city, Missouri and Kansas City, but also - and this seemed especially Kansas in 1861. But I felt one was considerably closer in Kansas both true of the English Department of the University even though many to the frontier and the past. Kansas was born'in history, history of the professors came from the East - against New York, New standing for the spectacular and the bloody. In a way, it was epitom­ England and the eastern seaboard generally. ised in a mural in Lawrence City Hall, representing the firing of the We were constantly visited by poets as they crossed the continent city by armed raiders from Missouri, forty miles away. Not for tirelessly from east to west and from west to east in the course of their nothing, indeed, was Kansas in its early days known as 'bloody itinerant reading, and I quickly realised how ignorant I was of the Kansas'. It had come into existence almost as an equipoise to Mis­ newer American poetry, how old-fashioned my tastes were. Or it may souri, which had been admitted to the Union in 1821. Missouri was a merely have been that, in terms ofPh'ilip Rahv's famous dichotomy, slave state from the beginning. The question of slavery was, of course; the poets who read at the University were redskins almost to a man, the great cause of tension between the states throughout the first half ' avowed disidents, militants against the war in Vietnam. They seemed of the nineteenth century, and it was in an attempt to ease that tension to be either of the Black Mountain School or from San Francisco, that the Kansas-Nebraska: Bill was passed by Congress in 1854. The though there was also Robert Bly, the Minnesota poet picturesque in bill gave settlers the right to determine whether slavery should be poncho and the most fervent of them all against the war. I found him a permitted under their governments, and one consequence of the bill stimulating extrovert who seemed a contemporary manifestation of was the founding by New England abolitionists of the Emigrant Aid the extreme romantic conception of the poet. He had been in England Company. It settled as many as two thousand abolitionists as colonists the year before, and he told me that he had liked England and the in Kansas, the most famous being John Brown, he whose body lies English much more than he had expected; a confession I found 266 267 disarming. We were visited by Denise Levertov, too, who struck me was by a long way the best turned-out man in the room, the Brooks as a woman of power and distinction. I did not know the poetry she Brothers exquisite from aNew Yorker advertisement. He was, I felt, waS writing before she left England, but her affiliations now seemed taking some wry p~easure in conforming to his audience's preconcep­ entirely with the Americans and mainly with Whitman and the Black tions of him. He was Richard Wilbur. Mountain poets. At'the end of the semester we left Kansas and in a leisurely fashion, For me, our season of visiting poets came to a ludicrous climax near by Greyhound bus, aeroplane and train made our way to New York, the end of the semester. I was taken aside by more than one of my pausing at Des Moines, 'Chicago and Poughkeepsie to stay with colleagues and warned that the poet who was next to visit us was a friends. I saw my wife and daughter on to the Queen Mary and then notorious reactionary, a follower of Eliot and Auden. I was not used to flew to Seattle, where I was met by Henry Reed, who was my initial thinking a liking for Auden the sign of a reactionary and I saw I was contact at the University of Washington. He had gone out there in old-fashioned indeed, the more so when the poet in question was 1963 as poet in residence after the death of Theodore Roethke, had described to me as an Easterner who had had it soft all his life, held later appointments and was returning to England in a matter of freew heeling through prep. school, Amherst and Harvard to his Chair days. It was he who had introduced me to the chairman of the English at Wesleyan University. He was presented to me as the acme of the department, Robert Heilman, one of the best known and respected effete, and the mere contemplation of him seemed to give rise to deep English teachers in America, a redoubtable scholar and an original passions and complex hatreds. He could not have been more summar­ 'New Critic'. We had become friends. ily dismissed ifhe had been English. He might indeed then even have In Washington, I was again in territory new to me. It was the been forgiven, for he could have been categorised as 'European and furthest I had travelled in America; indeed, if you travelled much fancy,' in Thomas Wolfe's phrase. further you would be in the Pacific Ocean. It was land's end literally, He was, in fact, one of my favourite American poets, the wittiest' and I felt I was in Ultima Thule, so different did I find it from and most elegant, 'and learned in his craft besides. I had met him in' anywhere else I had lived in the United States. The difference was London and liked him. I vias abashed by the reception he seemed partly climatic. I had left New York on a day of appalling humidity about to receive and felt, myself as in some way under sentence because with the temperature at 100 degrees and arrived in Seattle on a perfect I couldn't hide it from myself that he was almost my ideal modern afternoon fanned by a breeze off the Sound and the thermometer at 85. American poet. Before his reading, a small dinner party had been I knew that the climate of this section of the Pacific coast was always arranged for him in a private room in the Union'at the typically compared with that of southern England; it was better, as rainy but Mid-Western dining hour of six o'clock. He had not arrived at more temperate and balmy. And of course the scenery could not have six-fifteen, and by then the denunciations of him had become simply been more different from that of Kansas. From the windows of the irrational. He was not only a reactionary poet, he was indulging in faculty dining room one looked east to Mount Rainier, the highest characteristic Ivy-League behaviour towards the Middle West, con­ peak in the Cascades, over 14,000 feet high and permanently snow­ descending to us, high-hatting us. Everyone present knew perfectly covered. It looked perhaps twenty miles away but I don't doubt it was well why he was late. That afternoon, he had been reading in Kansas much further. The other way, almost underneath the windows it City, and one of our colleagues had been deputed to drive there, pick seemed, lay Puget Sound. And Washington is a state of great forests, him up and bring him back, after which it was understood he'd take almost, one might think, one huge national park. him home first for a wash and a drink, since alcohol was not served in The contrast between the two states illustrates beautifully, it seems the Union. to me, the effect of climate and landscape on people, for the racial He appeared at about six-thirty and we ate a hurried meal which stock in both Washington and Kansas is very much the same, indeed, passed without event; as indeed did the reading. He was treated, it the common American mix of peoples from the whole breadth of goes without saying, most courteously, and he behaved similarly, northern Europe, German, Scandinavian, Irish predominating, with though I detected irony in the running commentary he provided on dashes of Bohemian, Russian and other strains. But in Washington, his poems and in the way in which he was dressed. Tall, handsome, he one could not help thiQ.king, it had been subjected to pressures more 268 269 -I I' i' I beneficent than Kansas knew . Washington, more than any state I had -to them. I was never particularly enchanted by hippy beliefs, but they been in, seemed to be Walt Whitman's America. This, I do not need I did; at that moment of history and in that place, seem positively to telling, is bo~h a simplification and a sentimentalisation, the ~esul:, have come into lotus-l~nd. Those were the days of the Flower People, perhaps, of nothing more than six weeks in agreeable surroundIngs In and it waS disarming and surprisingly touching to be presented with a a more than usually good summer. All the same, the feeling rested on carriatio~ as I walked towards or away from my classes, even though I some things that are real, that are matters of fact. One is -that New nev~r knew what to do with it and felt absurdly self-conscious York is too far away to be of immediate significance, and the eastern carrying it in- my hand. seaboard with its weight of history and traditions is remote enough to During my last two weeks in Seattle I had a letter, forwarded from be ignored. The only city outside its frontiers it need concern itself home, enquiring very cautiously whether I was interested in being with is San Francisco, and even San Francisco is the best part of five considered for the Chair of English in the New University of Ulster . It hundred miles away. The North West, in other words, of which was signed by the Vice-Chancellor. The University, which I had not Washington is the principal state and Seattle the chief port and heard of, was to open its doors to students in a year's time. I did not metropolis, is virtually an autonomous region. In nothing is this take the letter entirely seriously but I answered with commendable more apparent than in its poetry, which goes its own independent circumspection. I had one thing to do before returning to England, way, owing nothing to Black Mountain or the Beats. which was to look at literary New England. Accordingly, I stood on AnotJIer strong feeling the visitor to Seattle has is that the Ultima the bridge at lexington, spent a day in Emerson's Concord and spat in Thule in which he finds himself is very much the gateway to other Walden Pond. What particularly fascinated me was Melville's New worlds. I had not been prepared for the Japanese tourists I saw on all Bedford, where I visited the chapel in which Father Mapple preaches sides and it was not until I heard them talking to one another in the great sermon in Moby Dick. 'Delight, - top-gallant delight is to demotic American that I tumbled to the fact that they were not him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is tourists at all but native Americans, nisei, the descendants ofJapariese only a patriot to heaven'. Melville's description is astonishingly immigrants. It is a reminder that, however far away it may be, Japan faithful to the chapel, which is still a seamen's chapel. I was thrilled is the nearest foreign country westward from Seattle. by it, and moved; as I was by the whaling museum that faces it. Seattle then is the port for what we with our local notions of the I caught the plane for London, not aware that I was thinking of the globe call' the F~r East. It is also the port for the Frozen North: Alaska possible professorship in Northern Ireland. Then it dawned on. me: is the next stop, and one has a sense of the close proximity of Alaska that Ulster was almost as easy to reach from London as Kansas or when one is in Seattle. It is many hundreds of miles away, but the Seattle and I realised that the New Grub Street I had been wandering number of people one meets who have been there or are on the point of along for thirty years could all the time have been leading to the going, make it seem a close neighbour. olive-grove of Academe, where, as we know, 'the Attic bird Trills 4er The inhabitants of the North West seemed to me more free than thick-warbled notes the summer long.' those of Kansas, less hag-ridden by ancestral forces, more extrovert. They gave a greater feeling of being in control of their own destiny, a sense of being less trapped; it was as if they could take off at a moment's notice for somewhere else, Alaska perhaps or Japan. The difference between the North West and Kansas, I suspect, is probably the difference between peoples who are brought up and live on the shores of great oceans and those who live land-locked lives. And I must admit that notion of the North West as a country of what one might call psychological ease, grossly subjective as it is, may well have been influenced by the presence all round me of hippies. I walked through them twice a day, because part of the campus was given over 270 271 Index

Ackerley, J.R. 63-4, 186 1O(}...5; and Wiliam Plomer 65; and Aiken, Conrad 24 E.M. Forster 65-8; and Peter Allen, Charles 7 Chamberlain 68-9; and Leslie Allen, Donald 148, 200, 217 Halward 69-70; becomes a Allen, Frank 2, 6-7, 121 schoolmaster 72; at University of Allen, George 3-4 Iowa 72-80; visits Kansas City 80-1; Allen, Walter ancestry 1-3; relatives visits Chicago 81; visits New York ·2-7; early reading of 6-7; and 81--6; and Robert Ballou 82-5; brothers 7; at King Edward's returns to England 86-8; joins Grammar School, Aston 8-30; writes Herbert Cater 89; completes Innocence first articles 10; acts 10; and Gissing is Drowned and moves to London 10-11; sit~ School Certificate 13-21; 95--6; and Edward O'Brien 96-7; as studies Blake 13-14; and Shaw and reader for MGM 98-100; and Blue Wells 14; and Bennett 14-16; and Moon Bookshop 105-7; and V.S. Desmond MacCarthy 15-16; and Pritchett 107-9; and Raymond Birmingham City Public Library Mortimer 109; and Margaret 16-17; and Robert Graves 16,20-1; Gardiner 109; demonstrates 111-2; and D.H. Lawrence 17-19; and T.S. publishes Innocence is Drowned 113; Eliot 19-20; passes Higher completes Blind Man's Ditch 113; and Certificate 22; and Daily Express Reggie Smith and Olivia Manning oratorical contest 23-5; visits Poetry 116-7; and outbreak of war 116-7; Bookshop 23-4; sits Balliol publishes Blind Man's Ditch 118; and scholarship 25-7; and Oxford 28-30; money problems 1939-40 119-21; wins Birmingham University and work in foundry 122, 130-1; and scholarship 30; as undergraduate L.H. Myers 123-30; as air raid 31-45; and Ernest de Selincourt warden 131; and John Mair 132; 33-4; and A.M.D: Hughes 34-5; becomes critic 133; and Henry . and E.R. Dodds 39-42; and New 'Green' 133-9, 149-50; and wartime Party 42-4; and W.H. Auden 44-5; experiences 140-1; and George 51-8; and Louis MacNeice 45-7, Woods 141-2; and Gwilyn James 91-5, 109; becomes a writer 48-50; 142-4; and attempts to enlist 144-5; and broadcaster 51; and John recurns to Birmingham 144-5; Hampson's wedding 55-8; and John marries 146; recurns to London Hampson· 58-71; and J.R. Ackerley 147-8; and Roy Campbell 150-2; 63-4; and Graham Greene 64-5, and Dylan Thomas 151-3; and Julian 273 MacLaren-Ross 153-8; and L.P. Bennett, Tertia 15 Divine, Father 83-4 Hart-Davis, Rupert 67 Hartley 158-69; and Elizabeth Beresford, J.D. 17 Dixon, Pierson 196-9 Hartley, L.P. 15, 124, 158-69 Bowen 166-7; and Edward . Bernstein, Sidney 194 Dodds, E.R. 30, 39-42, 63, 94-5, Hawes, Stanley 42 Sackville-West 167-9; and Anthony Bishop, Elizabeth 85 107, 200 Hawgood, John 265 Powell 169-71; af\d John Baker Blackett, P.M.S. 225 Dodds, Mrs 34, 40-1, 94 . Heilman, Robert 269 171-2; and New Statesman colleagues Blumenfeld, R.D. 25 Doone, Rupert 94-5 Heller, Joseph 252 172-80, 186-8; moves to Lydd 181; Blunden, Edmund 34 Douglas~Norman 36 Hemingway, Ernest 68, 86 and Joyce Cary 182-6; and John Bly, Robert 267 .Driberg, Tom.90 Heppenstall,' Rayner 28 Raymond 188-94; visits Bowen, Elizabeth 63-4, 162, 166-7, Herbert, A.P. 26, 29 Czechoslovakia 194-200; and 181, 198 Eliot, T.S. 19-21,24,33,40,50,52, Herickx, Gordon 42, 60, 63, 94-5 Chun-chan Yeh 200-1; publishes Bowra, Maurice 40 63,67,82,151,194, 197,205-7, Hicken, Norman 11-12 Dead Man over All 201; and The Breit, Harvey 217 209,216,251 Higham, David 118 English Novel 201-2; and Wyndham Bridges, Robert 33 Empson, William 37-8, 25~ Hobson, Thayer 182 Lewis 203-9; and Coe College Bridson, Geoffrey 208 Hopkin, Willie 18-19 210-23; andAII in a Lifetime 224; and Brierley, Walter 18 Fairlie, Henry 192 Hopkins, Harry 79 Hugh Gaitskill 225-6; visits Greece Briggs, Asa 30 Fiedler, Leslie 82 Hore-Belisha, Leslie 25 226-9; becomes literary editor ofNew Brooks, Van Wyck 24 Fisher, Vardis 76-7 Hughes, A.M.D. 34-5, 143 Statesman 230; and Aldous Huxley Brooks, Dr 81 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 68 Hughes, Richard 17, 232-6 230-1; and Christopher Isherwood Brophy, John 63 Florence, Philip Sargant 37,92, 175 Hutchins, Robert 79 231-2; and Richard Hughes 232-6; Brown, Francis 217, 222 Foley, Martin 85 Hurchinson, A.S.M. 207 and Vassar 237-53; and R.K. Brown, Ivor 193 Forester, C.S. 68 Huxley, Aldous 11,19,34,36,42,96, Narayan 241-3; and architecture Burgess, Guy 194 Forster, E.M. 8, 60, 62, 65-8, 71, 114, 224, 230-2 253-4; visits Russia 254-8; and The Burnett, Whit 85 135, 176 Huxley, Maria 19 Princess Cassamassima 256-7; visits 'Frank' 9-13 Universities of Kansas and Campbell, Roy 150-2 Frost, Robert 223, 250 Isherwood, Christopher 41, 53, 66, Washington 265-71; becomes Canetti, Elias 115 109,231-2 professor, New University of Ulster Carver, David 54 Gardiner, Margaret 109, 119, 123 271 Cary, Joyce 35, 182-6 Gardner, Helen 36, 182-3 James, Gwilym 142-4 Allen, William7 Cater, Herbert S. 89-91, 179 Garnett, David 7, 17, 248-9 Joad, C.E.M. 44 Allen·, (father) 1-3, 6 Cather, Willa 224 Giehse, Terese 55-8 'Joe' 22-3, 27, 72 Allen, (grandfather) 2 Caughlin, Father 79 "Gilkes, Martin 11, 233, 236 Johnson, Pamela Hansford 10 1 Anand, Mulk Raj 107 Cecil, Algernon 166 Goodyear, Robert 105, 119-20 joseph, Michael 96-7, 113, 118, 147, Arendt, Hannah 249 Cecil, David 183 Graves, Robert 16-17, 20-2, 53, 182, 185 Auden, G.A. 40, 53 Chamberlain, Peter 68-9, 87 222-3, 232, 234 Joyce, James 34 Auden, W.H. 21, 25, 34,40-1,44-5, Chaplin, Charles 194 'Green' (Yorke), Henry 26, 29-30, 49, 47,51-8,63-4,66,93-4,101,109, Charlton, Leo 63 53,67, 118, 133-9, 149,217 Kauffmann, Stanley 252 209, 232, 240, 256 Church, Richard 192 Greene, Graham 15, 29, 54, 63-5, Kennedy, Ludovic 243 Aryton, Elizabeth 243-4 Clark, Kenneth 14 100-5, 167, 187,241 Kermode, Frank 259 Ayrton, Michael 205, 243-4 Connolly, Cyril 67, 192 Gregory, Horace 82 Knox, E. V. 26 Cooke, Alistair 243, 246-7 Grigson, Geoffrey 13, 205-6 Baker, John 171-2, 202 Cowley, Malcolm 85 Lahr, Charles 105-7 Ballou, Robert 82-5 Craig, Harry 231 Haldane, J.B.S. 111. Lamming, George 217-18 Barbellion, W.N.P. 90. Cummings, A.J. 90-1 Halward, Leslie 69-70 Lane, Allen 202-3, 219 Barry, Gerald 50-1 Hampson, John 18, 52, 54, 55-71, 82, Lawrence, D.H. 17-19, 69, 248, 263 Bates, H.E. 63, 70, 98 Davenport, John 156, 175 91, 94, 101, 123, 135, 150, 168, Lawrence, T.E. 66 'Beaky' 9 Davin, Dan 185-6 182, 231 Leavis, F.R. 13, 176, 250 Behan, Brendan 242 Deeping, Warwick 207 Hanley, James 63 Lehmann, John 67, 133,231 Bellow, Saul 249 de la Roche, Mazo 208 Harris, Frank 266 Levertov, Denise 268 Bennett, Arnold 14-16, 21 de Selincourt, Ernest 33-4 Harrod, Roy 29 Lewis, Cecil Day 52, 116, 151 274 275 Lewis, D.B. Wyndham 17 Narayan, R.K. 241-2 Sirwell, Osbert 13, 44 Van Vechten, Carl 221 Lewis, Froanna 206-7 Newbolt, Henry 16 Smith, Janet Adam 186-7, 209, 225, Ventura, Professor 198, 200 Lewis, P. Wyndham 13, 17, 20, 94, Nichols, Robert 11 230, 249 Verschoyle, Derek 97 203-9 Nicolson, Harold 42-4 Smith, Reggie 56-8, 91", 95, 110-11, Vocadlo, Prof~ssor 196, 200 Lichtenstein, Vernon 2,14 Novemsky, Commissar 197-8, 200 114-16, 146, 149, 152, 237 Lindemann, Frederick 30 O'Brien, Edward 85-6, 88, 96-7 Snow, c.P. 225 Walker, Bernard Fleetwood 13 Linklater, Eric 1, 36-7 O'Hara, John 68 Sonnenberg, Ben 243-4 Walpole, Hugh 97 Lowry, Malcolm 24 Olsson, Halvor 37 Sp~nder, Stephen 54, 66, 93-4, 115, Warner, Rex 244 Lusty, Robert 182 Orwell, George 170, 187 150,239 Warren, Robert Penn 244 Stanley, Eileen 93 Waterhouse, John 35-6 Macaulay, Rose 66, 107, 117 Piper, Edwin Ford 79 Starkie, Enid 183 Waugh, Evelyn 1, 64, 135, 137, 170, MacCarthy, Desmond 15-16, 151, Plomer, William 60, 64-5, 151 Stewart, J.LM. 29 207 173, 178, 188, 199, 232, 246 Partridge, Ralph 63 Stonier, G.W. 174, 178, 187 Weidenfeld, George 177 McCarthy, Mary 55, 237 Plummer, Leslie 25 Strachey, John 43-4 Wells, H.G. 15, 91, 108 McCullers, Carson 249 Potocki de Montalk ('King of Poland') Swaffer, Hannen 24-5 Werth, Alexander 195 MacDiarmid, Hugh 37 105-6 Swinnerton, Frank 15 West, Nathaniel 224 Mackenzie, Compton 179 Pound, Ezra 16, 53, 208 Symons, Julian 205-6 West, Rebecca 205 Maclaren-Ross, Julian 140, 153-8, Pound, Reginald 208 Synge, J.M. 47 Weybright, Victor 82, 219-20 169, 170-1 Powell, Anthony 30, 68, 99, 169-71, White, Alan 207 MacNeice, Louis 40,45-7, 56-8, 176 Tate, Allen 216, 223 Whiting, John 231 63-4,91-5,109-16,123,150,162, Powell, Violet 169 Thomas, Andrew 4-5 Whitman, Walt 216-17 167, 173,217,223,237 Prescott, Orville 219 Thomas, Dylan 151-3, 242 Wilbur, Richard 268-9 Macrae, Elliott 202-3, 218-19 Pritchett, V.S. 64,107-9,172-3,176, Thomas, Edward 5-7 Williamson, Hugh Ross 50 Mair, John 132-3 186, 189, 208, 220, 249, 259-60 Thomas, K.B. 2, 4 Wilson, Edmund 207, 259 Malamud, Bernard 249 Thomson, Virgil 242 Wilson, F.P. 60 Mann Erika 55 Rahv, Philip 218, 249, 267 Titmuss; Professor 225 Wolfe, Thomas 242, 268 Manning, Olivia 116, 149, 156, 237 Raymond, John 176, 178, 188-94, Todd, Ruthven 152 Woodman, Dorothy 224-5 Mansfield, Katherine 19 . 224, 249 Trilling, Lionel 63, 213, 218, 248-50 Woods, George 141-2 Martin, Kingsley 16, 50,106,174-80, Read, Herbert 16, 28, 111, 206 Tugwell, Rex 79 Woolf, Leonard 62, 176 186-7, 198,203,224-5,230 Reed, Henry 28, 64, 269 Woolf, Virginia 34, 60, 62, 109 Maugham, W.S. 66, 97 Rees, Goronwy 118 Upward, Edward 53 Worsley, T.e. 173, 178, 186-7 Medley, Robert 94-5 Richards, LA. 38-9, 68, 93, 109 Melville, John 42, 63 Richardson, Maurice 173-5 Yeats, W.B. 40, 44, 108 Melville, Robert 42, 63 Ricks, Christopher 259 Mercer, Caroline 237, 247 Riding, Laura 17 Miller, Arthur 242 Roberts, Michael 44-5 Milne, A.A. 218-19 Roethke, Theodore 269 Mitchison, Naomi 51, 205 Romilly, Giles 173-4, 187 Monro, Harold 23-4 Rose, W.K. 207, 237, 240, 247 Moravia, Alberto 191 Rosenthal, M.L. 252 Morris, John 63 Ross, 76, 80-1 Mortimer, Raymond 109, 168, 172-3, Rovere, Richard 247-8 175, 177, 186,258 Mosley, Oswald 43-4 Sackville-West, Edward 167-9 Muggeric;lge, Malcolm 222 St John-Stevas, Norman 29 Muir, Edwin 128, 199 Sands, Ethel 15 Mumford, Lewis 232, 262 Shaw, G.B. 22 Murry, John Middleton 19-20 Sheppard, J. T. 198 Myers, L.H. 123-30 Sitwell, Edith 13 276